


my baby lives in shades of blue

by mother_fisher



Category: Titans (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Found Family, Implied/Referenced Torture, Protective Dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 12:34:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16723509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mother_fisher/pseuds/mother_fisher
Summary: Takes place immediately following 1x07. Dick learns more about what happened to Kory at the asylum and has a realization.





	my baby lives in shades of blue

**Author's Note:**

> 1x07 was angsty, so i decided to write more angst. probably fairly ooc.
> 
> unbetaed, has been edited but there may still be a few mistakes.
> 
> title from “shades of cool” by lana del rey.

They stop at a motel just outside Chicago. Kory drives most of the way, Dick in the passenger seat beside her, while Rachel and her mother sit in the middle bench. Gar is in the far back, curled up against the window. Dick pays for four rooms, all near each other just like last time. The clerk doesn’t so much as take a second glance at his sweat-soaked, disheveled state, decidedly less interested in him than the last one they’d encountered.

Dick sits alone in his motel room, wishing they could have gotten back to the safe house somehow. He couldn’t have asked Kory to go any further, one look at her let him know she was practically dead on her feet, he didn’t even know how she managed to drive as far as she had. At the same time, Dick doesn’t think he could’ve gotten behind the wheel in her stead.

He feels anxious, all of them spread out where he can’t see them. Protective in a way he’s never felt before. The safe house was better, glass walls and open doors, rooms big enough to fit them all without it being conspicuous.At the safe house, he could keep an eye on them all without being obvious. The idea of calling them into his room here just to ease his own mind is ridiculous, and surely they would agree.

Still, sometime later he finds himself making his way to Kory’s. She’d taken the room two doors down, so that Gar and Rachel were sandwiched between them. He’d given her the key to the one next to his, selfishly perhaps, but she’d swapped with Gar afterwards. “Safer to have them protected on both sides,” she shrugged.

He knocks on her door, lightly. It’s only a few seconds before he hears the sounds of the door being unlocked.

“Can I come in?” He asks. She’s still wearing her purple jumpsuit, but she looks different. Her face is clean of makeup, and Dick notices he has to lower his gaze to meet hers because she’s without her usual heeled boots, making her several inches shorter than him.

“Sure,” she opens the door wider, allowing him through. The moment he enters it feels like a weight’s been lifted off his chest.

He walks over to her bed, wavering for a moment before he takes a seat. Kory stays by the door, leaning against it. The big gold ring she usually wears is gone, so she locks and unlocks her fingers instead. Neither of them say anything for awhile. Dick just lets his eyes rest on her.

“How’s your throat?” He finally asks.

“Hurts, sort of,” Kory says, she glances at him for a second before lowering her eyes back toward the ground. “Like an ache. I heard—the _doctors—_ ” she says it with obvious disgust “—they said I heal more quickly, but I can still feel it. Like it’s still there.”

He ignores the back half what she says as he replays the first few things she said, picking up an unintentional clue. “They said you should—how did they know?”

Kory looks at him, almost confused, oblivious to what she said to tip him off. “What do you mean?”

“How did they know that you ‘heal quickly’? Did _you_ even know?”  Dick feels something low and dark build in him, something like dread. He only feels himself begin to get angry when he sees the look on her face. Quickly masked, in a failed attempt to hide it from him, but unmistakable: anger first, Kory’s pretty face goes hard and bitter for a millisecond. Then, even worse, something he’s never seen from her: fear.

“Kory,” he’s standing in front of her before he even realizes it, her back against the wall and less than three inches between them. His voice is hard and demanding when he asks, “ _What_ did they do to you?”

She shifts closer and for a second he thinks she’s going in to kiss him, trying to work her way out of this by seducing him, but then he sees what she’s doing. She undoes her thick gold belt, letting it fall to the ground.

He feels the scar before he see it, his hands go to her waist instinctively. Dick’s thumb grazes the raised skin there and he sees red.

“I’ll fucking _kill_ them,” he’s falling to his knees before he even knows it.

“Dick it’s—” Kory looks down at him, unsure at first of what he’s doing, taken aback by his sudden passion. When their eyes meet, and she sees the look in his, she freezes. There’s a sadness in them, the sadness of man without purpose, of someone who’s failed to do something they set out to. There’s also rage, boiling under the surface, protective, _possessive_ rage. As she sees this concern in him, Kory’s features softened and her hands find their way his hair. “Dick, we’re—”

He’s angry like it’s _personal,_ like he hasn’t been since his parents. Hot and all-consuming and burning inside him. “They shouldn’t have,” He feels it building in him, he feels it in his throat. “They shouldn’t have _touched_ you!” It’s almost a yell, he feels his grip on her hips get tighter, almost without his control. “Or Gar, or Rachel, _or—_ ”

“Dick, I’m fine, really. _We’re_ fine. We’re all here together, and they’re dead, remember?” She runs her fingers through his hair, bent slightly at the waist, so his head rests against her stomach. “They’re _dead.”_

“I should have been there,” He presses his lips to her scar, again and again, almost frenzied, working his way up to her mouth. Dick repeats the words like a mantra, phrasing different each time but intent and regret are the same. “It shouldn’t have happened, I shouldn’t have _let_  it.” He kisses her long and hard, arms tight around her like he’s afraid she’ll slip away if he loosens them.

Kory shushes him, and maybe she is seducing him now, as she urges him toward the bed. She tries to convey with her eyes, with her mouth, with her body that he’s done nothing wrong, or shameful, or worthy of regret, but she’s not so naive as to think she’ll be able to. So she does the next best thing: she tries to make him forget.

When he wakes up, it’s dark. It had been daylight when he’d gotten here. A glance at the clock tells him it’s nearly three o’clock in the morning. Kory is fast asleep, her head on his chest, red curls splayed on the pillow beside her. She looks so vulnerable, the walls she keeps up between her everyone else fallen away. Dick feels the same panicky feeling as before seize him, protective. Too protective, maybe. He thinks back to the way he felt when Jason told him about the tracker. He doesn’t want her, or any of them, to ever feel that way about him, violated by the lack of boundary. The all-encompassing feeling of overprotectiveness he feels almost makes him think it’s worth the risk, as long as they’re safe. And that’s what terrifies him.

He shouldn’t feel this way, so viciously protective, for these people. People he doesn’t even know, not really. It makes him feel disgusted with himself, how strongly Dick feels for Kory—for _all_ of them. How he already feels himself pitfalling into the pattern of possessive, overprotectiveness he so loathed from Bruce.

He eases himself out from under Kory, dressing quickly and quietly.

It’s too much of a risk, anyway, having people you care about. Dick had learned that the hard way. He can’t afford to have people that matter to him. Not like this, not again. And he can’t put that burden on them, either. He won’t let himself.

He takes one last lingering look at Kory, let’s his eyes worship her in a state he’ll never see again, before making his way down the hall back to his own room.

 

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are appreciated <3


End file.
